Baldwin Basinger Divorce A Legal System Tragedy
Author: Ed Sherman

Divorce specialist attorney Ed Sherman has seen cases like the
highly acrimonious Alec Baldwin-Kim Basinger custody battle
many times over in his long career.

He observes, "I don't know Alec Baldwin or Kim Basinger, but I
do know our legal system intimately, so I can tell you with
absolute certainty that the Baldwin-Basinger tragedy is a
high-profile example of something that happens hundreds of
times every day to people who have no headline value."

"What we are witnessing, with the media in full cry, is the
failure of a legal system that still thinks we are in the
Middle Ages," he adds. "What we are seeing is something that
didn't have to happen, that probably would not have happened if
we had a legal system that made sense."

Sherman explains that in our "adversarial" system, courts are a
forum where people are expected to fight—it's designed that way!
It started in the Middle Ages with trial by combat, where men
with a disagreement would fight violently before a
representative of the king and he who walked away was "right."
Today, physical force is no longer an approved legal tactic
but, otherwise, things haven't changed much. The parties are
still regarded as adversaries—enemies in combat, competing to
win.

In modern usage, you get a hired gun—an attorney—to do battle
for you and you sign a retainer agreement where the more
trouble you have the more money your attorney makes. Can you
guess how that works out?

In a divorce, attorneys for each side compete, argue and
struggle against one another (on your behalf) and use up all of
your emotional and financial resources trying to "win" your
case, to "beat" the opposition. You and your children spend
years living in a hellish war-zone. The rules of professional
conduct require an attorney to be aggressive, because we think
that's a good thing. But it isn't. It produces rich attorneys
and tragedies like the Baldwin-Basinger family, every day by
the hundreds.

In a sane universe, people who are breaking up would be guided
through a non-adversarial process of conciliation, encouraged
to step back, take a breath and think about what's best for the
kids, what's fair, what makes sense. You would work with trained
mediators and negotiators rather than litigators. But no, that
would make sense.

"Let's use this sad case as a reason to take a very close look
at how we force families in crisis into a system that is
guaranteed to make things more difficult for troubled families
that are ground through it, where there are no solutions, only
more problems, where intolerable pressure brings out the worst
in people, which is exactly what happened to the
Baldwin-Basinger family," says Sherman.

"Let's have a little sympathy for them and some scorn for the
system that failed them as it has failed all families in crisis
for generations gone by.

"My life's work has been to help people avoid unnecessary pain
and expense when going through a break up, which starts with
finding ways to avoid being represented by an attorney and
staying as far as possible from our dysfunctional legal system.
I dream of a day when my services are no longer required,"
Sherman says.

About The Author: Ed Sherman is a divorce specialist attorney
and award-winning author of How to Do Your Own Divorce in
California – the book that launched Nolo Press and self-help
law in 1971. His books and software have saved millions of
people billions of dollars. Visit http://www.nolotech.com/.